A woven fabric or a knitted fabric (hereafter referred to as a fabric) using spun yarns of a polyester staple fiber has been widely used in various applications and has superior qualities. Nevertheless, this fabric has disadvantages in that the bulkiness thereof is unsatisfactory and the touch is not soft, giving a paper-like handling, and an elimination of the above disadvantages is a serious technical problem when dealing with this fabric. The above paper-like handling also appears in a blended yarn of the polyester staple fiber and a cotton fiber or a fabric using the polyester and cotton blended yarn. Although it has been proposed that high class cotton fibers such as Egyptian cotton be used as the cotton fibers to eliminate the paper-like handling, the use of such high class cottons does not give a soft touch to the fabric, and therefore, it is not possible to thereby obtain a fabric having a high quality.
The use of a polyester staple fiber of a fine denier has been proposed as an attempt to solve the above-mentioned problems, but the touch of the fabric using the polyester staple fiber of the fine denier becomes surely to soft. Moreover, problems such as an unsatisfactory bulkiness and resiliency of this fabric, which are important characteristics of the fabric appeared in this fabric. Further, a polyester staple fiber having a fine denier, particularly a polyester staple fiber having a denier of 1.0 denier or less, is likely to generate neps during a carding process and an unevenness of the sliver obtained is likely to become larger. Even if a countermeasure such as a lowering of a rotational number of a doffer in a carding machine or the like is adopted, it is not possible to obtain a sufficient improvement. Further, this method is not preferable because the productivity of the spun yarn is remarkably lowered.
As another attempt to solve this problem, a blended yarn using a plurality of staple fibers, in which the fiber length of the fibers is changed, has been disclosed in the specification of U.S. Pat. No. 4,466,237. The bulkiness of the fabric obtained by this method is slightly improved, but conversely, the touch of this fabric is very coarse. Further, since staple fibers having a short fiber length are blended to the yarn without a change in the number of the fibers constituting the yarn, a problem of a lower strength of the blended yarn arises.
A method of blending staple fibers having a coarse denier and cut to a long fiber length with staple fibers having a fine denier and cut to a short fiber length, in a spinning process, is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Pat. Publication (Kokai) No. 59-26537 as a method using a staple fiber having a fine denier. Nevertheless, the uniformity of the obtained yarn and an improvement of the paper-like handling of a fabric using this yarn are unsatisfactory, and the productivity level of this method is low. The above unsatisfactory performance occurs because a method of blending the staple fibers used is inferior to a blending method used in a conventional spinning process, i.e., a blending method in a scutching process or a drawing process due to use of a staple fiber having a fine denier and a staple fiber having a coarse denier which greatly different from the denier of the fine denier staple fiber. Namely, a surface area of the staple fiber of the fine denier is remarkably larger than that of the staple fiber of the coarse denier, and therefore, it is considered that the above unsatisfactory performance is due to an increased friction between the staple fibers having a fine denier, and when the fine denier staple fiber is blended with the coarse denier staple fibers, the separation of the fine denier staple fibers is insufficient and blocks of the fine denier staple fibers are generated in the spun yarn.